Dorothy Young

Dorothy Young, who died on March 20 aged 103, was the last surviving stage
assistant to Harry Houdini, the master showman, illusionist and escapologist.

6:17PM GMT 22 Mar 2011

During her year with the “World-Famous Self-Liberator”, she played the role of the scantily-clad “Radio Girl of 1950”, a 1920s impression of what radio would be like several decades later.

Dorothy Young

In the autumn of 1925, in what turned out to be his last American tour (he died a year later), Houdini would start his act with a large mock wireless set which he opened front, back and top, exposing the internal mechanism to show that there was nothing there before closing it again. A voice would then announce: “Miss Dorothy Young doing the Charleston” — which was her cue to pop one foot out of the radio followed by the other one.

“I kicked my feet together and jumped up and did a curtsy,” she recalled. “And then Houdini would take me by the waist and lift me down, and I would go into a Charleston.”

Houdini’s finale was his famous Chinese Water Torture Cell, which he had performed in England to great acclaim. Clad in bathing trunks, his feet padlocked into mahogany stocks, he would be lowered upside-down into a glass-fronted tank filled with water. A curtain would then be drawn across the tank. Although Dorothy Young knew how he escaped, she never revealed his secret.

After Houdini’s death in 1926 she and Gilbert Kiamie, the playboy son of a silk lingerie magnate, came to international prominence as a dance act called Dorothy and Gilbert featuring their own Latin dance, the “rumbalero”. The couple subsequently married. Occasionally working as a model (her legs were once passed off as those of Gloria Swanson), Dorothy Young also danced in many early films, including the Fred Astaire musical comedy Flying Down to Rio (1933). Later she published a novel inspired by her career, Dancing on a Dime, which was filmed by Paramount Studios in 1940.

Dorothy Young was born on May 3 1907 at Otisville, New York, the daughter of a Methodist minister. While studying at Beaver College, Pennsylvania, she saw Anna Pavlova perform and determined to become a ballet dancer.

But while visiting New York with her parents aged 17 she saw an advertisement in the stage paper Variety for a vaudeville dancer to join a Broadway show, followed by a tour of the United States. When she arrived for the audition, she sat at the back, too shy to step forward.

But she was spotted by Houdini and his manager, who asked her to dance the Charleston; she signed a year’s contract and was sworn to secrecy about the mysteries of Houdini’s act. She then had to persuade her parents that joining the great illusionist was a suitable career move.

Houdini’s wife, Bess, fitted her for a silk stage costume. In the show the two women performed a stately minuet before the great man made his entrance and introduced the “Radio Girl”. In another illusion, The Slave Girl, Houdini would tie Dorothy Young from throat to ankles to a pole, before causing a curtain to fall to the floor. She would then emerge in a beautiful butterfly costume en pointe and dance a ballet number. When Houdini first introduced the “Radio Girl” illusion at Hartford, Connecticut, in September 1925, Dorothy Young remembered meeting the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who patted her approvingly on the head. The show transferred to Broadway before touring several major cities.

During the Second World War, having trained as an engineer and in personnel management, Dorothy Young was assigned to a factory making shock absorbers for the US military.

After Gilbert Kiamie became her second husband and inherited a fortune, Dorothy Young was a generous benefactor to Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, endowing it with a $13 million arts centre.

She had a son with her first husband, Robert Perkins, who died 13 years after their marriage. Gilbert Kiamie died in 1992.